WR Isaiah Hodgins has turned into quite a find for Giants

For Isaiah Hodgins, the waiting truly was the hardest part.

He was selected by the Bills in the sixth round of the 2020 NFL Draft, but the combination of his injuries and a wide receivers room that was as crowded as it was talented kept him from finding a home on the Buffalo roster.

Last November, when the Bills waived Hodgins, the Giants claimed him.

What a find.

Would the Giants have won a playoff game for the first time since the 2011 season without Hodgins and his eight receptions (105 yards) and a touchdown against Minnesota in January?

And from the Giants, the 24-year-old Hodgins got all he ever wanted — a chance.

“Isaiah’s a true professional,” offensive coordinator Mike Kafka said Thursday. “He comes to work every day, has his routine, goes through the process of being a pro, brings young guys along with him as well. So he’s always trying to coach them up and give them his experiences.”

From their days together in Buffalo, coach Brian Daboll is an admirer.

“I think he made the most of his opportunity,” Daboll said. “He made the most of his chances.”

Hodgins has become a core member of the Giants. He is an encourager of younger players. He is a worker at his craft who, before talking to Newsday on Friday, finished his post-practice work on the JUGS machine.

“Knowing that we have a team with explosive players and good guys, not everyone is going to get the ball every game,” Hodgins said. “Your time’s going to come. Being patient and unselfish is going to help us win games.”

Those sound, to some degree, like the words of his father, James Hodgins, who was the fullback on the St. Louis Rams “Greatest Show on Turf” team that won Super Bowl XXXIV. He also was a member of the Arizona Cardinals when they lost Super Bowl XLIII to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

On that remarkable Rams team, James Hodgins told Newsday this past week, “No one demanded the ball.”

That message clearly has resonated with his son.

Another refrain that has served Isaiah well: “Control what you can control.”

Beginning with the Giants’ acquisition of Hodgins in November, he knew he was in a personal crash course in learning their playbook, even if it did have similarities to what he knew in Buffalo.

These days, with the playbook mastered, he said he can focus more on “just being able to work on my game as a receiver and how I progress every single day.”

He has learned a lot from his dad. James coached his sons at Berean Christian High School in Walnut Creek, California, and he has shared countless stories from his time in the NFL. The Hodgins family is a close one. Isaiah and his younger brother Isaac, a defensive lineman at Oregon State, were born only 370 days apart. They have a sister, Imoni, who is still in high school. Their mother, Stephanie, has spent time in New Jersey to help out during training camp with Isaiah and his wife Maya’s two young children.

The family plan is to go to five Giants games and five Oregon State games this season.

“Being on a Super Bowl team — and I won one and lost one — it’s special,” James Hodgins said. “You remember it, you remember the camaraderie, what it took to get there. You remember everything about that season because it was so special. And even when I left the Rams and went to the Cardinals, I found myself telling [Cardinals players], ‘This is how we did things on the Rams. This is how we got to that level.’ ”

James said he “couldn’t help but share that knowledge” with his sons.

“It was special,” he said. “We had Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce, Az Akeem, Ricky Proehl and Marshall Faulk, who could also be a receiver. And no one ever complained about how many touches they got. There was the understanding that if we won, everyone would get accolades. If an opponent takes something away one week, you have to counter with something else.

“They were great years. That’s what I’ve always wanted for my sons, to have that type of camaraderie in football.”

James has marveled as Isaiah’s game has grown.

“He’s a way better athlete than I was,” the father said. “Way better athlete.”

He laughed.

“I just wanted to catch the flat route, and he’s making one-handed catches and tight-roping the sidelines,” James said. “I’m like, man, who taught this kid how to catch? He’s been doing it for a long time, and knowing how hard he works, it’s easy to see how he’s successful.”

As they say, father knows best.

By Kimberly Jones

kimberly.jones@newsday.comkimjonessports

Kimberly Jones covers the Giants for Newsday, a beat she first worked in the early 2000s before joining the YES Network to cover the Yankees. She worked for the NFL Network for more than a decade and has been heard semi-regularly on WFAN.